alt Hacker News> But isn't it a trade off, like many things in life?
It absolutely is. For example, as soon as I turned 45, I got colonoscopy done, because the benefit of getting tested outweighed the cost of getting tested.
So if the dentist says, I suspect there's some rot, or my family member has started complaining of toothache, I would have no hesitation to get the x-ray, if recommended. But it is the regular, nonchalant nature of annual dental x-ray procedures that concerns me.
YMMV on the annual x-ray thing. I used to mostly think the same as you. Expensive and unnecessary risk for no real benefit.
I skipped my x-rays for 3-4 years due to dropping my long term dentist for unrelated reasons.
I recently went to a new dentist due to a previous filling cracking and had the regular x-ray done as part of routine new patient intake.
The x-ray caught the problem in another tooth done at the same time - rot behind a filling that was not visible just by looking. The same thing happened on the tooth that cracked, and had I caught it earlier I wouldn’t have had to have a crown done on it. It’s only a matter of time now until it needs a root canal due to how much material had rotted during those few years between x-rays. Most likely it was shoddy work on the two fillings be previous dentist, but in general fillings have a limited lifetime, they will generally fail at some point and need redoing. A small gap can let bacteria in and starting growing where you can’t see it and a brush won’t reach.
The annual x-ray likely saved me from another crown since the material loss was less due to being caught relatively early. $70 to remove the old filling and refill it vs a $2200 crown.
Xray also caught a pretty serious bone infection issue due to a birth defect combining in an unfortunate way with a sports injury from my teens. Although that one probably would have been done in time due to my two front teeth starting to wiggle I guess. Would have been a couple more years of bone loss though, and and even longer recovery time after the bone graft. And likely more than one implant needed vs the single one I have now.
Your personal risk tolerance and how you weigh things of course is very individualistic and only you can set it. Just tossing one random datapoint out there.